deconstruction: on speaking tongues

Photo courtesy: Wikimedia Commons

Editor’s note: This is part of an ongoing series wherein I deconstruct much of my years and experiences in a charismatic church.

I was warned away from the church I eventually fell in love with, the church that would teach me all I knew about God and the church that would place in me a thimble of fire that would never go out. 

They're a cult.

That's what everyone said. I learned a few weeks later it was because they spoke in tongues. 

I still remember the first time I heard it—the way my mind felt expanded and disoriented but eager to hear more, if only at a distance.

Eh sakka delu sh bakka iush eh sakka ska

It was like a made-up language or the sounds of a drunk slurred beyond comprehension.

Soon my best friend, who had started going to this church with me a few months back, told me he had been baptized in the Holy Spirit and could now speak in tongues. I didn’t know you could be baptized with anything but water and I was intrigued by this holy language, so I asked him to tell me more.

He told me about the baptism, in the youth pastor's office, and of visions of fire and doves settling on him like a warm, heavy blanket and of a language burbling out of him like a fountain.

The words, he said, just started coming out of me, and I felt peaceful and energized at the same time. 

​It wasn’t long before I asked to be baptized in the Holy Spirit. Like my friend, I sat in the youth pastor’s office with the youth pastor and one of his youth leaders. They quoted scripture referencing tongues, asked me if I wanted that, too, and then placed their hands on my shoulders and began to pray. 

Omh shala delala shala liuq ofu 

I felt nothing. Nothing happened. 

Am I doing something wrong? I asked.

They prayed more, coached me on the language, and told me not to overthink it. 

I went with it and let the words—words I felt like I was making up—roll out of me like a thunderstorm leaving a plain, fierce and quick and violent. 

Like faith itself, doubts persisted.

How can this be real? 

The one thing I couldn’t deny was the experience of speaking in tongues, the way it made me feel. 

The closest I can get to describing it is to compare it to meditation. In fact, Thomas Keating, a Cistercian priest, monk, and abbot who was largely responsible for re-introducing Christianity to contemplative prayer, a form of Christian meditation, says as much in his book, “Open Mind, Open Heart.”

“The gift of tongues is the one gift that may be given primarily for one’s personal sanctification. It is a kind of introduction to contemplative prayer because, when praying in tongues, one doesn’t know what one is saying.”

Public domain

Before youth services, a select group of leaders would gather to assemble the chairs in our gymnasium-sanctuary and then to pray over each one. We were called the Fire Keepers, and our role was to help others find their fire and keep it stoked. For an hour before every service, we’d set up the chairs and then pace around the dimly lit sanctuary, praying in tongues with worship music playing gently in the background. 
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The presence of God, as we called it, was thick and murky, like fog. It was almost as if I couldn’t see clearly, but I had the distinct feeling of being clearly seen—open and vulnerable. I was clay in the potter’s hands. 

Years later, when I started my professional career, I remembered those services mostly for the servant attitude they instilled in me. I remembered the youth pastor telling us to set the chairs up first because even the smallest things, when done with heart and pure intention, are anointed with holiness. The smallest acts of service open big doors, he said. 

It’s one of the few lessons I carry with me today from that time, and I consider it a spiritual truth. 

And though I don’t speak in tongues anymore, sometimes, out of nowhere, those incomprehensible words will come to my tongue unbidden, begging to be released into existence. 

Sometimes I go with it, an experiment of what happens when a dormant faith meets a secular humanist. If I go with it long enough, if I pray in tongues for even a minute or two, I feel centered, calm—almost trance-like. Sometimes I describe it as giving my spirit a refreshing bath.  

My heart opens, like it did then, and I wonder if this, too, is not true. ​​​I wonder if the trap I set all those years ago, the experiment to see what this speaking in tongues business is all about, didn't, somehow, catch my leg instead.